Founder Spotlight: Derek Hopfner

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Founder Spotlight: Derek Hopfner

The digital age puts customers first.

It is crucial that the legal ecosystem uses technology to create seamless experiences for customers.

According to a recent report found by Canadian Lawyer, the legal industry is worth $30 billion in Canada. Despite being one of the slowest industries to adopt technology, the emergence of legal startups today is unprecedented, and Canada needs to keep up as there are ample opportunities for innovation within the sector.

Derek Hopfner and co-founder Shane Murphy were practicing lawyers prior to starting Founded. Their third co-founder, Travis Houlette, had previously started his own company and sold it to Yahoo. Throughout that process, Travis felt the experience was not as transparent as he expected it to be, so the trio decided to dig into finding solutions to make the legal experience faster, more efficient and collaborative for entrepreneurs.

Simplicity, innovation and trust are the company’s main values. A key factor to Founded’s success is their online platform that automates business legal workflows: from generating documents and capturing eSignatures, to filings with government and making legal work easily accessible.

Originally focused on automating routine legal work for small business and startups, Founded now extends its reach to law firms. They work with more than 1000+ businesses, law firms, accounting firms and large enterprises to automate legal tasks like incorporating, ongoing company compliance, government filings and legal agreements.

The Founded user experience is unlike any other due to the diverse mix of legal and non-legal experience the employees of the company have. According to Hopfner, hiring people who have no previous experience in the legal industry makes their product more digestible for the masses and creates more streamlined experiences.

“No one cares that you’re building anything. When you’re building a product, you have to think about your sales distribution channels,” says Hopfner. “You have to be building a product for a specific audience, and understand how your target market will consume it in a really easy way.”

While navigating legal jargon may not seem like an exciting endeavour for users, Founded aims to change that. “Our goal is to make the legal side of business effortless. When using Founded, entrepreneurs have a better understanding of their legal work and company data, while saving time and money.”

The only problem with innovation in the legal industry is that there are established models such as billing that do not prioritize efficiencies especially if work is being charged at an hourly rate. With Founded’s technology, entrepreneurs take charge with the ability to translate complex legal concepts into straightforward language in a fast and effective manner.

Want to learn more about Founded? Visit their website.
Twitter:@FoundedCo
Instagram: @FoundedHQ

Founder Spotlight: Michelle Caers

Entrepreneur-in-Residence turned founder Michelle Caers has been on both sides of the DMZ accelerator offer. An expert in user experience design, she has been a resident coach to our startups for the past three years, while simultaneously working on getting her edtech company Crowdmark on its feet. Her mission – to enrich the learning and teaching experience for students and educators by transforming assessment into a dialogue for improvement.

Technology is changing the face of education at a rapid pace.

With the availability of ample information online and various emerging educational institution models, it is becoming difficult for students to see the value of HigherEd. Universities must re-evaluate the ways they can change the educational experience in order for them to keep up with innovative trends and for students to see the true value of accredited degrees.

A catalyst for that change is in the feedback loop provided for students; a byproduct of time-savings.

Originating with UofT mathematics Professor James Colliander, Crowdmark provides a solution to a real life problem. Faced with grading 5,000 exams by hand during the 2011 Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge, Colliander realized there needed to be a more effective practical marking process instead of the cumbersome red pen on paper approach.

Crowdmark’s artificial intelligence analyzes vast datasets generating unparalleled insights into teaching and learning. These insights help drive innovation in grading for educators and support personalized learning for students.

Rooted in the belief that teaching and learning are fundamentally a human-to-human exchange, the grading platform focuses on automating repeatable actions, eliminating pain points that educators experience when marking student workpapers and providing rich, formative feedback on exams and assignments. The tool increases educator’s productivity by 75%, allowing more time to focus on providing meaningful, constructive feedback to learners. It further provides a direct positive impact on students as it allows for electronic submissions, reducing paper waste and the anxiety of meeting tight deadlines.

“AI shouldn’t replace human interaction, it should enhance people’s experience. You can automate a spreadsheet or anything that’s repetitive and predictable with machine learning, but you cannot replace human judgement in high stakes decision making situations,” Caers says.

Time-savings, increased productivity and more meaningful connections with learners are only a few of the highlights in Crowdmark’s value proposition, and for some educational institutions, it’s even changed their pedagogy. “At McGill University, they used to do a lot of multiple choice exams, but once they implemented our application, they now have a more robust assessment strategy.”

Caers has shared a wealth of advice as a resident DMZ EiR and she is definitely not a stranger when it comes to closing large sales deals. “To close impactful deals, you need to understand the buying processes and security regulations in the industry you’re operating in. We supported our champions by listening to what our organizations want, and delivered accordingly.”

With 37 million papers already graded and institutions like the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo and University of Southern California using the platform, Crowdmark is using insights to continuously build more features to enhance their offer and continue to lead improvements for educators and learners.

To have an edtech company excel in our space as a university-backed accelerator, confirms our impact and mission.

Learn more about the company: @crowdmark | crowdmark.com

DMZ Sandbox is proud to announce six student grant winners

Twice a year, students gather to pitch their innovative ideas to a panel of judges. Last week, Ryerson’s community of students, entrepreneurs, business leaders and investors attended the event at the Sheldon and Tracy Levy Student Learning Centre to hear about some of the most innovative and forward thinking startup ideas. With over 90 applications received, the list was narrowed down to 14 pitches. The ideas were incredibly competitive and saw some tough decisions made by the judges.

Who won?

$5K winners
*In partnership with Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship:

MettleAI is a system of care for opiate and alcohol-dependent individuals that predicts regressive behaviour before a relapse occurs using a predictive model created with Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence.

Ftr. is a platform that allows artists to feature on each other’s songs securely, outsource their mix and set their song for release all while growing their network and building exposure.

Menuless is a mobile app that connects users directly with the kitchen, immediately reducing labour cost while maintaining a high-quality experience. Menuless leverages technology to help restaurants improve experiences, keep up with the trends, and connect with a wider audience.

$10K winners:

uBioDiscovery is a gut microbiome monitoring program that not only tells you the composition of your microbiome, but also provides diet suggestions tailored specifically to each customer’s unique microbiome profile. uBioDiscovery’s SUPERBIOME kit is optimal for those affected by microbiome related conditions, or anyone else who is driven to improve their overall gut health!

Contraverse is a Canadian Academy Award-nominated immersive media company laying the foundation for the future of cinema. They have developed a turnkey Virtual Reality Cinema solution for film festivals and exhibitors to screen VR content with ease.

Co-Founder of uBioDiscovery, Stage 2 Winner

$15K winners:

Taiga Robotics is developing the next step in human-robot interfaces for industry, through the emerging field of virtual reality. Taiga Robotics has developed a human-robot interface which makes control of robots easy and intuitive, requiring almost no training; they call it telereality.

What’s this all about?

A student’s finances can be the biggest barrier to turning an entrepreneurial idea into reality. The DMZ Sandbox Student Grant Program financially supports eligible Ryerson student-led startups with grant funding. It aims to fund innovative projects and initiatives that are positively impacting the economy and society.

The grant is available in a series of stages, with the following amounts available to eligible startups at each stage: Stage 1: up to $5,000, Stage 2: up to $10,000, and Stage 3: up to $15,000.

You want in?

To learn more about the Sandbox Student Grant visit https://dmz.torontomu.ca/dmz-sandbox/ and follow us on Instagram @dmzsandbox to stay up to date!

How to incubate creativity

Using a person’s brainwaves to find the perfect music to induce a state of zen. “The Three Musketeers” made into a queer, feminist web-series. An analytics platform that utilizes an array of data points to find soon-to-be famous artists.

These are just some of the success stories to come out of Ryerson’s Transmedia Zone, an industry-leading storytelling incubator that helps artists become entrepreneurs.

But how, exactly, do you incubate creativity? Can business and art truly come together in a cohesive manner?

To find out, BusinessCast host and managing partner at Bennett Gold LLP, Robert Gold, sits down with Emilia Zboralska, interim director of the Transmedia Zone and academic specialist in the Canadian media landscape.

“We encourage people to fail fast” says Zboralska, explaining how the Transmedia zone pushes its team to adopt a rapid validation cycle so they’re never stuck on an idea that isn’t viable.

Canada is at the precipice of “the next industrial revolution in media” says Zboralska as traditional media platforms are slowly losing audiences to newer platforms.

In this episode, Zboralska shares some of the exciting ways the Transmedia Zone is disrupting the Canadian media landscape and what’s next in the realm of storytelling, both online and in the real world.

For anyone wondering how a creative idea can become a practical business, this edition of BusinessCast powered by The DMZ is just for you.

Streamlining patient care with Manny Abraham

Doctors depend on a wide array of systems to provide patient care.

There’s just one problem: none of the them properly talk to each other.

That’s why Manny Abraham created Orbcare Inc., a platform that merges the information doctors use and patients provide, making sense of it all to streamline patient care.

All sorts of similar pain points exist in the medical field and, Abrahams, with over twenty years of experience in the sector, joins BusinessCast host Robert Gold to dive into the exciting fusion of innovation and medicine.

Biotech and healthcare startups are some of the fastest-growing in the world of technology. Investors of every sort are hoping to take a slice of the pie, so much so that healthcare and biotech companies raised over $28 billion in 2018, according to PitchBook.

Abrahams takes us through why it’s such an exciting time for innovation in healthcare and why Canada is uniquely placed to be a major player in the sector.

Expect all that and more in this edition of the BusinessCast Podcast powered by The DMZ.

DMZ Raise Roundup

$4.6 billion. That’s how much Canadian tech companies raised in VC funding in 2018. A record for our country’s thriving sector.

With 2019 well underway, we are already seeing a trail of impressive raises. This week, DMZ startups got a boost with a number of rounds. Here’s the latest on who raised how much, and from whom.

Roofr lands a $4 million seed round

After completing the Y Combinator program, Roofr, a new type of roofing service that uses aerial imagery to provide customers with a free roofing estimate online, announced it raised $4 million led by CrossLink Capital and a line of angel investors.

Currently serving the Bay Area, the entire state of Florida and the province of Ontario, the company plans to use the funding to expand its reach to new marketplaces and has its eyes on the state of Texas. The company will also be growing its engineering, sales and marketing teams.

*Photo: Kevin Redman (CTO, Roofr) & Richard Nelson (CEO, Roofr)*

NXM raises $7.7 million

NXM Labs Inc., an autonomous security and data integrity company, announced the close of its $CAD7.5 million pre-series A funding led by Cedarpoint investments Inc.

With the IoT industry on track to be one of the fastest moving technology sectors in history, this financing comes at the perfect time. The company will commercialize their award-winning NXM SecureSuite software platform that enables connected devices and systems to manage their own security in order to continue to ward off hackers.

EnergyX raises for further expansion in the U.S.

EnergyX Solutions, an online energy auditing platform, has raised $500,000 from MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund following a $1.3 million raise in August 2018.

Already working with companies like Enbridge, Gas Distribution and CLEAResult, the Toronto-based startup is putting their money towards further expansion in the U.S. where there is a larger market to tap into.

How VanHack attracts global tech talent

Canada is in dire need of more talent, with tech vacancies poised to reach 200,000 by 2020 nationwide. If Canada doesn’t bring in more high quality talent into the national startup ecosystem, our cities won’t be positioned to grow into true tech powerhouses. According to a recent CBRE report, a lack of available tech talent is a major issue for many cities with burgeoning tech sectors.

Fortunately, VanHack, a startup headquartered in Vancouver focused on recruiting tech talent, is picking up the slack to help develop tech clusters in cities across Canada. “We bring the world’s best tech talent to you,” says Ilya Brotzky, founder and CEO. Since launching in 2015, VanHack has helped nearly 600 individuals find work in Canada, growing over one hundred percent year-over-year in the process.

But VanHack isn’t just your typical recruiting service. The company brings international tech talent to Canada. As an immigrant himself, Brotzky understands just how transformational living and working in Canada can be to a newcomer. “As an immigrant from the (former) Soviet Union, this is really personal for me,” says Brotzky. “It’s great to help other people have the experience I had.”

Focusing on helping immigrants find work in Canada is at the core of what VanHack does. In fact, the majority of VanHack’s clients comes from countries that aren’t as economically developed as Canada. In other words, VanHack is helping skilled workers come to Canada and not only improve their quality of life but contribute to impactful growth for our ecosystem.

That’s why many of VanHack’s clients are willing to relocate to smaller Canadian cities. Whereas most Canadian software developers will head to Toronto or Vancouver, VanHack brings folks to smaller cities like Kamloops, B.C. “It can be a win-win-win. Win for the company, win for the candidate, win for the city” says Brotzky. “If we bring 50-100 hires to a city, that’s 50 or 100 families that are now contributing to the local economy.”

Shaking up its approach to recruitment in new and successful ways, VanHack brought a group of 20 female senior developers from all around the world to companies based in Toronto and Waterloo as part of their new recruiting initiative “Leap.” VanHack’s video coverage of the event showcases how it is a far more dynamic recruitment style than the typical “see job post, contact company” approach.

Creating more in-person events is a top priority for 2019 with a focus on bringing companies to tech talent, not the other way around. “We’re seeing it as a new way for international recruiting,” says Brotzky, “the next way to hire.”

TRSS X DMZ: Startup Certified Program

By Jude Saqer

The Startup Certified program at the DMZ Sandbox is not only helping entrepreneurial students fund their business idea – it’s greatly impacting founders at the DMZ. Through this program, founders at the DMZ can employ post-secondary students to support their marketing and sales teams. The Ted Rogers Student Society (TRSS) subsidizes up to fifty percent of the students’ salaries, further helping founders employ tech talent from Toronto Metropolitan University. Students are put through a rigorous program on startups led by experts in different industries. Once they’ve completed the program, they can either apply to work with a DMZ startup or start their own company and get paid to do it!

Since its launch, the DMZ Startup Certified Program has matched around 30 founders with students who bring value, ambition and expertise to their startups. I spoke with a few of these founders to understand how the overall process went and what they appreciated most about the program.

Karen Lau, founder of Furnishr, a startup focused on furnishing your home from selection to delivery, assembly and clean-up. Karen’s team needed help on the operations side of running her business, and appreciated that the program allowed her to look at a pool of talent from Toronto Metropolitan University. At the end of the process, Karen selected Julia, a Business Law student at Ryerson. The impact Julia made exceeded her role as an operational specialist – she expressed interest in UX Design, and was able to convert sales into clients. The tweaks she made to the design of the website helped provide an overall seamless user experience for potential customers of Furnishr.

Chris Snoyer, Founder of Spiffy, boasts that he only hires young talent through the Sandbox’s Startup Certified program. “As soon as I know students are being put through the program before they apply and they do it voluntarily, it automatically gets me more interested”, Snoyer says. Startup Certified has not only provided founders with the financial support needed to hire interns, but the students help fix broken processes. Snoyer explains how having fresh eyes in the business can tell you a lot about what your business is currently lacking. “If I can’t train a student to follow a certain process, that tells me that my processes aren’t working well and I need to iterate on them.” Snoyer’s previous student staff, Neal, created a content services program enabling the company to expand their services to a portion of a running business that may be overlooked when involved in a startup, therefore solving an adoption problem they once had. Spiffy’s founders would definitely recommend this program to any founder looking to gain financial support and an extra set of hands that help run your startup. It also provides you a perspective you may have not considered in the past about your marketing best practices.

DMZ Alum Brandon Pizzacalla, co-founder of GrowthGenius, had a great experience with the program and says that his past student staff from Startup Certified is now working for the company full-time. This would not have been possible had it not been for the talent that is provided within Toronto Metropolitan University, which focuses on enhancing students’ entrepreneurial mindset. “A lot of great talent is locked in universities and the program provides great exposure to participating students”, says Founder of FortunaAI Omer Jamal.

Through this program, the DMZ Sandbox is making an impact on founders and students, from the community they’re exposed to, to the coaching and opportunities provided through the network. The Startup Certified program will be starting again, to find out more about the program attend one of our Information Sessions on either Jan. 30th at 2:00pm or Feb. 5th at 5:30pm at DMZ Sandbox. Register here.

Wired Different

By YUNG WU (CEO, MaRS Discovery District), ABDULLAH SNOBAR (Executive Director, DMZ) and DEAN HOPKINS (Chief Growth Officer, OneEleven)

Canadians are wired differently. We embrace difference differently. We assimilate differently. We approach change differently.

This difference gives us an edge in a world that is being rewired. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the sharing economy are changing human existence and reshaping society as we know it. While geo-economic centres are being rewired around these transformative innovations, geo-political narratives are becoming more turbulent, with the rise of nationalism and threats to free-market values.

As disconcerting as these developments are, they are giving Canada – in particular the Toronto region – an advantage on the world stage. While others are turning inward, we have doubled down on our commitment to multiculturalism and diversity, creating fast-track visas for skilled tech workers.

It seems to be working. According to CBRE, Toronto is the fastest-growing tech market in North America. At a time when tech talenti s a more valuable commodity than any natural resource, this region has built an enormous competitive advantage – attracting workers from around the world looking to live in a vibrant community that embraces difference.

This growth tells a story that goes for beyond simple job metrics. Call it our diversity dividend: More than half our ventures have at least one foreign-born founder, and a larger proportion of our ventures are led by women than in Silicon Valley. This diversity is reflected in the faces of the entrepreneurs profiled throughout this magazine.

Multinationals are also being drawn here. In September alone, more than $1.4 billion of investments in Toronto’s tech sector were announced by companies including Microsoft, Uber, and Shopify. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

How to explain this tectonic tech shift? We’d argue that it’s due to our collaborative and inclusive culture. Toronto innovation hubs like MaRs, the DMZ, and OneEleven are working together to provide a fertile environment for young companies to grow. Hubs like these and others in the surrounding region offer prime real estate where entrepreneurs, business leaders and venture capitalists can co-locate,providing a natural networking platform that engages and empowers the community.

This magazine features more than 50 tech companies to watch in Toronto and the surrounding region. Many of these ventures are focused on socially beneficial verticals such as health, cleantech an d technologies impacting the future of work and commerce.

Toronto’s attraction – and unique value proposition – is its approach to responsible disruption. This means supporting companies that cam make an impact globally. And we have no shortage of them. Take, for instance, Wealthsimple, which is helping customers make the most of their money with an easy-to-use, low-cost investment platform. Founded four years ago, it already has $2 billion under management.

Spoonity has built a client engagement platform for restaurants and retailers that is rapidly gaining traction in South America, with almost with almost 17 million processed to date.

Meanwhile, companies like Opus One are bringing the era of clean energy closer. Its powerful software lets grid operators understand and manage the massive amounts of data needed to control a system powered by thousands of individual solar panels and wind turbines.

These and other ventures profiled in this magazine are just a small sample of Toronto’s burgeoning tech sector. As our ecosystem grows, so its impact will grow, too. That is good news for our region, for Canada and the world.

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The fine art of the humble brag

By DAPHNE GORDON

To thrive in a competitive global marketplace, Toronto-based startups must embrace the humble-brag, says Abdullah Snobar, executive director of the DMZ, a world-leading, not-for-profit tech accelerator in downtown Toronto.

“Sales is the biggest segue to success” he explains. It’s going to help make a start-up a global enterprise down the road.”

But the sales pitch often doesn’t come naturally to tech startup founders, many of whom got into the game because they saw a consumer problem and had the know-how to build a technological solution.

“If you look at Canadian culture, we’re not known to be assertive,” he says. “So for entrepreneurs, it’s about embracing the humble brag. Not being arrogant, but being proud of what you’ve been able to accomplish.”

That’s why the DMZ launched a sales accelerator in 2016. Designed to help tech businesses become global enterprises, it helps companies grow from startup to scale-up.

Capital Follows Sales

The program focuses on developing an aggressive sales method, building a sales-oriented team, providing marketing support and equipping founders with the leadership skills they need to create global impact.

Throughout a four-month period, world-class mentors assess a startup’s needs and customize a growth strategy that encompasses all aspects of the business.

The capacity to create revenue is what startups need now, says Snobar. The program helps founders realize that capital follows sales.

“For us, this is a new narrative” he says. “Toronto has been in an episode where we’ve been helping a lot of early-stage companies come to life, become market ready…Now they need to acquire customers that can get them to scale.”

The DMZ ranked #1 in the world

Located at Yonge and Dundas Square, the DMZ at Toronto Metropolitan University was ranked as the top university-based incubator worldwide by UBI Global in 2018.

It’s home to as many as 70 startup companies at any given time, providing open-concept spaces on six floors of an office tower that looks out over the square.

Each quarter, six startups are accepted into the sales program. They relocate their teams to set up shop in an environment that’s meant to create a sales mindset – complete with a gong to bang when a deal gets made.

Starting in 2019, the accelerator is expected to expand significantly, quadrupling the size of the quarterly cohorts.

Mentorship makes a difference

The DMZ’s sales program helped Casalova an online real estate marketplace that streamlines the processes of buying or renting a home, scale up in 2017.

The company now boasts a downtown headquarters and a staff that includes a team of independent sales agents. Thanks to a $2.5-million investment from Aviva Ventures, a U.K. – based fund, Casalova is on track for more growth in 2019.

“Our business wouldn’t be where it is today without the DMZ” says Ray Jaff. Casallove co-founder and CEO, pointing to the accelerator’s community of startups, accountability structures and introductions to investors as factors in the company’s success.

But what really helped Casalova crack the code of scaling was mentorship from the DMZ’s coaches, who were embedded in the business and helped the company refine day-to-day practices as well as leap large hurdles.

“It was helpful to have access to people who had been there, done that,” says Jaff. “I knew I could try to learn on my own, through trial and error, or I could have a 30-minute sit-down and save months and thousands of dollars in lost time.”

Exposure to a global marketplace

Participants in the accelerator program attend events with founders from across the region and intimate workshops with industry leaders. They also go on a two-week, multi-city road trip to key global markets such as New York and San Francisco for curated, one-on-one meeting with customers and investors.

The overarching goal is to create a competitive sales mindset so startups can reach their full potential. If they’re acquired, they can earn what they deserve.

“The mindset has changed,” says Snobar. “Whereas before it was a major milestone to be acquired for a million dollars, now the stakes are higher. Now we’re saying: Let’s become a sales behemoth.”

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